Against a backdrop of tensions over Confederate monuments, Trump's executive order hits at a main theme of his reelection campaign.

Near the end of Donald Trump's polarizing, history-steeped speech at Mount Rushmore on Friday, the president announced he would sign an executive order establishing a "national garden of American heroes" where statues of "historically significant Americans" would be built or rebuilt.

In a moment of dueling national tensions over systemic racism and a deadly pandemic — and with a presidential election looming in November — Trump's surprise executive order raises two questions: Will it actually ever happen.

The executive order comes amid a national debate over the removal of Confederate monuments following civil unrest sparked by the Minneapolis police killing of a Black man, George Floyd.

"These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn," Trump's executive order reads, an opinion he drove home repeatedly at his South Dakota rally and in the weeks preceding it, and in an address from the White House's South Lawn on Saturday.

The executive order to establish the park, which had not been announced beforehand, sets the stage for what could be a heated debate over which prominent American figures make it in.

The executive order also floats for inclusion Christopher Columbus and Junipero Serra, two Europeans immortalized in U.S.

Those same prioritized prosecutorial actions would also be used to protect Trump's statues garden, the president conspicuously states in his executive order.

On Wednesday, Trump dangled the possibility of a veto to any defense bill that scrubs the names of Confederate figures from military bases, tweeting that the names have become part of a "Great American Heritage."